If we assume that all races of people are equally good at basketball, how can it be explained that 74.4% of basketball players are African American but African Americans only make up 13.2% of the population? The chances that there is no discrimination is way lower than 1 in a billion.
Absolutely. In california in addition to the normal gamut of propositions that might seem boring, yet have far reaching effects on our state, we also have the choice of legalizing recreational marijuana and abolishing the death penalty.
I think at this point, it's really a guessing game of which of the two is more dangerous.
I agree. I don't think there is any way to really know objectively. I am just going with my gut. I don't pretend my gut is more likely to be right than anyone else's.
. My reading is that with Trump, I'm seeing his stupidity and incompetence fully exposed; I don't think the man is capable of holding anything back.
That's how I read it as well. But I think the potential damage from just what we have seen is already pretty fucking scary to me.
Hillary has learned to play her cards close to the chest, and I think there is a power-hungry psychopath hiding behind her public persona. I suspect she would have no qualms ordering someone killed if it served her political purposes and she felt she could get away with it.
That's pretty much how I feel as well. Although I think Trump would also be willing to have someone killed if he thought he could get away with it, and it benefited him, but maybe he is less capable of getting away with something like that, and maybe he knows that.
Hillary has screwed up badly as SoS, and shown that she is rather resistant to advice.
Sure. I think the email thing is a good example of that. I will say I think the whole Benghazi thing is just republicans trying to fabricate a controversy out of nothing. They did find the private email server, but that's not what they were looking for, and it has nothing to do with Benghazi other than it's where the Benghazi investigation ended up.
I sort of feel like something like Benghazi or even the private emails server wouldn't even make the news if it happened in a Trump presidency, because of all the other even crazier shit that would be going on.
And the Clinton political machine also has enormous power, both domestically and abroad.
Very scary!
On balance, Hillary still scares me more than Trump.
That's fair. I'm glad I don't have to make this choice. I live in California, which is definitely going to Clinton anyway. So I will be doing my ritual protest vote, like always.
Nearly everyone who knows business will argue that Trump has been successful.
I don't think this is an objective claim. How shall we define people who "know business"? Also, it doesn't matter what people who "know business" think. It matters what the facts are.
I do not personally know a whole lot about running a corporation, so I will not sit here an pretend I do.
I don't know anything about running a corporation or making it successful. I do however know about math. If someone starts his career with X dollars and runs a series of corporations for many decades, and at the ends all he has to show for it is Y dollars in assets, which is about the same ROI than the entire market on average, it makes them a mediocre business man at best. Add on top of this that the fact that it seems like he also engages in a pretty decent amount of fraud, and it looks even more pathetic.
But I have been thoroughly convinced by those who do know business very well, including close friends who deal with it daily, who have explained to me that Trump has been successful at business.
So if you know nothing about business, and don't claim to, how do you know your friends are good at business and consequently whether their opinion is accurate?
If you want to discredit him, I don't think that angle is the best approach.
I'm not trying to discredit him. I spend roughly half my time defending trump from false accusations (e.g. misquotations, etc). I think he is doing a perfectly good job of discrediting himself.
All the experts that I personally know, whether they like Trump or not, at least agree that he is a good businessman.
There are plenty of people saying that Trump is a bad business man. Are those people experts? How would you even know if you know nothing about business and don't claim to?
Here is my advice. Don't listen to experts (self-proclaimed or otherwise). Do your own research.
Here are just some random articles I found doing a quick google search.
This isn't some kind of weird angle I came up with. And whether we have the right numbers or not (only Trump and his accountants and lawyers know that), this is in my opinion a legitimate and objective comparison of how well Trump did vs. how well someone could do with no business or financial skills if they had started with the same amount of money.
Who knows maybe Trump will release his tax returns for the last 40 years, and we get a clearer picture of how much money he actually has, how much he inherited, etc. Made he is richer than we all assumed, and he's a great business man. Maybe he is much poorer than he claims (as people like Mark Cuban have speculated), and he is actually a terrible business man.
I am genuinely open to both possibilities. The claim I am making is that the comparison to index funds is a good one, and if it turns out he did much better than index funds, I will admit that Donald Trump is a good business man (if not an ethical one). The other claim I am making is that not everyone "good at business" thinks Trump is a good businessman. A lot of that is undoubtedly political, so I would hesitate to say Trump was a bad business man because lot's of people said he was bad, but the opposite is also a pretty dubious claim.
If he didn't he would not have been so successful in business.
I think this is a myth. Apparently he would have made more money, had he just left the money he inherited from his father in an index fund. If Trump is such a great businessman, why is his level of success not better than a typical retirement account (which requires no effort to manage)?
And even that, bankruptcy can be argued as a legitimate business strategy. He has a track record of success.
Bankruptcy is a legitimate business strategy. What is not legitimate is getting free shit by refusing to pay people for their labor, and using your wealth and lawyers to deter people from seeking justice. Neither is running a fake charity to exploit the generosity of others for your own personal benefit. What Trump has done a good job of illustrating, is how a child can be "successful" (i.e. have an ROI almost equivalent to an index fund) if he has lots of money and no ethical standards.
He has a track record of success.
Only if your standard if success is not super high.
That's better than Hillary, who sells out to Wall St and Saudi Arabia, and tells the American people what polls suggest she should say in order to get elected.
I was not making a comparison to Hillary. I personally think Hillary is the better choice of the two, but I realize this is an election year with two horrible options, and I can't blame anyone for choosing a bad option this year. I will definitely be voting for someone other than these two pathetic excuses for candidates. I don't live in a swing state, and my vote doesn't count regardless of who I vote for.
I doubt he'll start WW3, that's bad for business.
It is. But, Donald Trump is a terrible business man who cares much more about his ego than any business.
He will probably pick lots of fights with Congress and insult foreign leaders, which will stymie any residual political agenda he has, whatever it may be.
I think having his plans stymied is the best case scenario for a Trump presidency. Unfortunately he will be the commander in chief, and he doesn't need congress to order an airstrike on a foreign country. He doesn't have the power to "declare" war without congress, but he certainly has the power to get another country(ies) to declare war on us.
I consider that preferable to Hillary actually succeeding at her crony capitalist domestic agenda and continuing her horrible foreign policy track record.
Even if we are just considering foreign policy, there are not many people I would want in the white house less than Hillary Clinton. But the republican party somehow managed to find a person that would make me *want* HIllary to win. And that person is a 70-year old man-child who (as much as a despise crooked Hillary) cannot in good conscience trust with the nuclear codes.
And no, I don't want to see Hillary succeeding in pushing her corrupt agenda. If she is elected, I sincerely hope everything she wants to do is stopped. And yet, I still find this situation preferable to potential carnage that Donald Trump has convinced me he is capable of.
I don't think Trump would be helpful towards winning this hypothetical WW3 that he started, nor do I think he will do anything to help keep terrorists out of our country. He's just a fucking asshole and an idiot that was born with money and unencumbered by ethics.
Putting Trump in charge is probably similar to just deciding which bills are vetoed and which aren't via coin flip. He could make some really good decisions, or some really bad ones. He might do better than Hillary, or worse. It just depends which tweets from which people made him angry that day.
Well even if that's true, what he says right now (to win the election), doesn't matter. What you are talking about is pandering, which Hillary certainly does. I don't think Trump is smart enough to even pander properly.
He will change his mind 15 times, not even remember what his position was, and probably end up losing the election anyway. Even if he wins the election, we will be too busy dealing with WW3 to care about internet oversight.
I don't think the $300-$500 penalty is from lack of crapware. I think it is from the lack of economies of scale that other vendors have.
I like the idea of buying a laptop that has hardware chosen based on it's ability to run linux well, rather than simply hoping that linux works well on it after reading a bunch of forums, and I don't mind paying a premium for that.
I was actually about to buy a lemur, but recently determined I need to be able to run Autodesk Fusion 360, which only runs in windows, plus the lemur doesn't have a 4k screen, which is something I'd like to have.
This makes no sense. There is such a tiny percentage of people that are going to try to put linux on their laptop, and even those people are going to be paying for a windows license anyway. Selling laptops that come pre-installed with windows makes sense, but preventing linux installations seems like such small peanuts, I can't imagine microsoft would even care.
I suspect it is exactly what lenovo claims it is. They are using some dumb hardware that isn't supported by linux (yet).
Even if microsoft did ask lenovo to do this, it's still lenovo's fault for agreeing to it. You are buying the laptop from lenovo, not microsoft. And I'm sure that "not disclosing that other operating systems can be installed" is not a feature requested by microsoft.
It makes sense for when you buy something new, use it, decide you don't want it anymore, and return it. You have devalued the product since it can no longer be sold as new. I have no problem with paying a restocking fee for that kind of situation (you can look at it as a rental fee). It's a different story if it is defective or not advertised properly, etc.
Or the business is simply not a member of the BBB, and the BBB no longer has any "jurisdiction" anymore. Why as a business would you pay a yearly fee for the "privilege" of being subjected to arbitration, that you could otherwise just ignore (even if they always ruled in your favor)? You get an A+ rating with some organization that no one could possibly care about in 2016? You might as well make up your own award and give it to yourself. If your customers have never heard of it, then it will probably carry more weight than a BBB rating.
The BBB? That's just a support group for people to vent about businesses they don't like. They don't have any actual power. Also, it seems like this has nothing to do with microsoft, and everything to do with lenovo using some proprietary hardware that linux doesn't yet support.
It seems like this has nothing to do with microsoft at all, and is just lenovo using proprietary hardware that linux doesn't yet have support for (i.e. the same thing that has been happening this whole time).
Supply and demand is about the closest thing to a natural law in the whole field of economics. If you don't believe in supply and demand, let me ask you this question:
Why doesn't uber just keep their prices perpetually high? What is the rationale for ever lowering prices? Aren't they a greedy corporation that would prefer to have the higher profits that come with selling products for higher prices?
So if supply and demand don't apply to pharmaceuticals, why did you think it was appropriate to use pharmaceuticals as an analogy for uber drivers (to which supply and demand are certainly applicable)?
The choice isn't between a $5 cure and a $100K cure. It's between a $100K cure or waiting until demand goes down.
If there were enough drivers on the road, the price would have been lower. The higher prices are to spur more drivers to get on the road. If you prevent uber from raising prices, all you are doing is disincentivizing drivers from working, and removing the option for customers to pay a high price for a ride.
If it's criminal to offer customers a higher price for a ride in a time of high demand, what is it when you remove their ability to get a ride at any price in a disaster?
Slashdot Mirror
If we assume that all races of people are equally good at basketball, how can it be explained that 74.4% of basketball players are African American but African Americans only make up 13.2% of the population? The chances that there is no discrimination is way lower than 1 in a billion.
Absolutely. In california in addition to the normal gamut of propositions that might seem boring, yet have far reaching effects on our state, we also have the choice of legalizing recreational marijuana and abolishing the death penalty.
Why not just allow their birthdays to be posted, but forbid addition and subtraction?
That epipen company is a perfect example, because Tesla has a monopoly on cars?
I think at this point, it's really a guessing game of which of the two is more dangerous.
I agree. I don't think there is any way to really know objectively. I am just going with my gut. I don't pretend my gut is more likely to be right than anyone else's.
. My reading is that with Trump, I'm seeing his stupidity and incompetence fully exposed; I don't think the man is capable of holding anything back.
That's how I read it as well. But I think the potential damage from just what we have seen is already pretty fucking scary to me.
Hillary has learned to play her cards close to the chest, and I think there is a power-hungry psychopath hiding behind her public persona. I suspect she would have no qualms ordering someone killed if it served her political purposes and she felt she could get away with it.
That's pretty much how I feel as well. Although I think Trump would also be willing to have someone killed if he thought he could get away with it, and it benefited him, but maybe he is less capable of getting away with something like that, and maybe he knows that.
Hillary has screwed up badly as SoS, and shown that she is rather resistant to advice.
Sure. I think the email thing is a good example of that. I will say I think the whole Benghazi thing is just republicans trying to fabricate a controversy out of nothing. They did find the private email server, but that's not what they were looking for, and it has nothing to do with Benghazi other than it's where the Benghazi investigation ended up.
I sort of feel like something like Benghazi or even the private emails server wouldn't even make the news if it happened in a Trump presidency, because of all the other even crazier shit that would be going on.
And the Clinton political machine also has enormous power, both domestically and abroad.
Very scary!
On balance, Hillary still scares me more than Trump.
That's fair. I'm glad I don't have to make this choice. I live in California, which is definitely going to Clinton anyway. So I will be doing my ritual protest vote, like always.
Nearly everyone who knows business will argue that Trump has been successful.
I don't think this is an objective claim. How shall we define people who "know business"? Also, it doesn't matter what people who "know business" think. It matters what the facts are.
I do not personally know a whole lot about running a corporation, so I will not sit here an pretend I do.
I don't know anything about running a corporation or making it successful. I do however know about math. If someone starts his career with X dollars and runs a series of corporations for many decades, and at the ends all he has to show for it is Y dollars in assets, which is about the same ROI than the entire market on average, it makes them a mediocre business man at best. Add on top of this that the fact that it seems like he also engages in a pretty decent amount of fraud, and it looks even more pathetic.
But I have been thoroughly convinced by those who do know business very well, including close friends who deal with it daily, who have explained to me that Trump has been successful at business.
So if you know nothing about business, and don't claim to, how do you know your friends are good at business and consequently whether their opinion is accurate?
If you want to discredit him, I don't think that angle is the best approach.
I'm not trying to discredit him. I spend roughly half my time defending trump from false accusations (e.g. misquotations, etc). I think he is doing a perfectly good job of discrediting himself.
All the experts that I personally know, whether they like Trump or not, at least agree that he is a good businessman.
There are plenty of people saying that Trump is a bad business man. Are those people experts? How would you even know if you know nothing about business and don't claim to?
Here is my advice. Don't listen to experts (self-proclaimed or otherwise). Do your own research.
Here are just some random articles I found doing a quick google search.
http://fortune.com/2015/08/20/donald-trump-index-funds/
And here is one critical of this comparison
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/should-donald-trump-have-indexed-
This isn't some kind of weird angle I came up with. And whether we have the right numbers or not (only Trump and his accountants and lawyers know that), this is in my opinion a legitimate and objective comparison of how well Trump did vs. how well someone could do with no business or financial skills if they had started with the same amount of money.
Who knows maybe Trump will release his tax returns for the last 40 years, and we get a clearer picture of how much money he actually has, how much he inherited, etc. Made he is richer than we all assumed, and he's a great business man. Maybe he is much poorer than he claims (as people like Mark Cuban have speculated), and he is actually a terrible business man.
I am genuinely open to both possibilities. The claim I am making is that the comparison to index funds is a good one, and if it turns out he did much better than index funds, I will admit that Donald Trump is a good business man (if not an ethical one). The other claim I am making is that not everyone "good at business" thinks Trump is a good businessman. A lot of that is undoubtedly political, so I would hesitate to say Trump was a bad business man because lot's of people said he was bad, but the opposite is also a pretty dubious claim.
If he didn't he would not have been so successful in business.
I think this is a myth. Apparently he would have made more money, had he just left the money he inherited from his father in an index fund. If Trump is such a great businessman, why is his level of success not better than a typical retirement account (which requires no effort to manage)?
And even that, bankruptcy can be argued as a legitimate business strategy. He has a track record of success.
Bankruptcy is a legitimate business strategy. What is not legitimate is getting free shit by refusing to pay people for their labor, and using your wealth and lawyers to deter people from seeking justice. Neither is running a fake charity to exploit the generosity of others for your own personal benefit. What Trump has done a good job of illustrating, is how a child can be "successful" (i.e. have an ROI almost equivalent to an index fund) if he has lots of money and no ethical standards.
He has a track record of success.
Only if your standard if success is not super high.
Let's force Charter to charge $0.01 for cable modem rentals. That will solve everything.
That's better than Hillary, who sells out to Wall St and Saudi Arabia, and tells the American people what polls suggest she should say in order to get elected.
I was not making a comparison to Hillary. I personally think Hillary is the better choice of the two, but I realize this is an election year with two horrible options, and I can't blame anyone for choosing a bad option this year. I will definitely be voting for someone other than these two pathetic excuses for candidates. I don't live in a swing state, and my vote doesn't count regardless of who I vote for.
I doubt he'll start WW3, that's bad for business.
It is. But, Donald Trump is a terrible business man who cares much more about his ego than any business.
He will probably pick lots of fights with Congress and insult foreign leaders, which will stymie any residual political agenda he has, whatever it may be.
I think having his plans stymied is the best case scenario for a Trump presidency. Unfortunately he will be the commander in chief, and he doesn't need congress to order an airstrike on a foreign country. He doesn't have the power to "declare" war without congress, but he certainly has the power to get another country(ies) to declare war on us.
I consider that preferable to Hillary actually succeeding at her crony capitalist domestic agenda and continuing her horrible foreign policy track record.
Even if we are just considering foreign policy, there are not many people I would want in the white house less than Hillary Clinton. But the republican party somehow managed to find a person that would make me *want* HIllary to win. And that person is a 70-year old man-child who (as much as a despise crooked Hillary) cannot in good conscience trust with the nuclear codes.
And no, I don't want to see Hillary succeeding in pushing her corrupt agenda. If she is elected, I sincerely hope everything she wants to do is stopped. And yet, I still find this situation preferable to potential carnage that Donald Trump has convinced me he is capable of.
I don't think Trump would be helpful towards winning this hypothetical WW3 that he started, nor do I think he will do anything to help keep terrorists out of our country. He's just a fucking asshole and an idiot that was born with money and unencumbered by ethics.
Putting Trump in charge is probably similar to just deciding which bills are vetoed and which aren't via coin flip. He could make some really good decisions, or some really bad ones. He might do better than Hillary, or worse. It just depends which tweets from which people made him angry that day.
Well even if that's true, what he says right now (to win the election), doesn't matter. What you are talking about is pandering, which Hillary certainly does. I don't think Trump is smart enough to even pander properly.
Clearly... /s
I'm voting for neither, shithead.
He will change his mind 15 times, not even remember what his position was, and probably end up losing the election anyway. Even if he wins the election, we will be too busy dealing with WW3 to care about internet oversight.
Also, we are no longer in danger of the government suppressing free speech, so the 1st amendment no longer has justification either.
I don't think the $300-$500 penalty is from lack of crapware. I think it is from the lack of economies of scale that other vendors have.
I like the idea of buying a laptop that has hardware chosen based on it's ability to run linux well, rather than simply hoping that linux works well on it after reading a bunch of forums, and I don't mind paying a premium for that.
I was actually about to buy a lemur, but recently determined I need to be able to run Autodesk Fusion 360, which only runs in windows, plus the lemur doesn't have a 4k screen, which is something I'd like to have.
This makes no sense. There is such a tiny percentage of people that are going to try to put linux on their laptop, and even those people are going to be paying for a windows license anyway. Selling laptops that come pre-installed with windows makes sense, but preventing linux installations seems like such small peanuts, I can't imagine microsoft would even care.
I suspect it is exactly what lenovo claims it is. They are using some dumb hardware that isn't supported by linux (yet).
Even if microsoft did ask lenovo to do this, it's still lenovo's fault for agreeing to it. You are buying the laptop from lenovo, not microsoft. And I'm sure that "not disclosing that other operating systems can be installed" is not a feature requested by microsoft.
Microsoft is evil, not stupid.
It makes sense for when you buy something new, use it, decide you don't want it anymore, and return it. You have devalued the product since it can no longer be sold as new. I have no problem with paying a restocking fee for that kind of situation (you can look at it as a rental fee). It's a different story if it is defective or not advertised properly, etc.
It seems like it doesn't even have anything to do with microsoft. From what I read this is all Lenovo's doing.
Or the business is simply not a member of the BBB, and the BBB no longer has any "jurisdiction" anymore. Why as a business would you pay a yearly fee for the "privilege" of being subjected to arbitration, that you could otherwise just ignore (even if they always ruled in your favor)? You get an A+ rating with some organization that no one could possibly care about in 2016? You might as well make up your own award and give it to yourself. If your customers have never heard of it, then it will probably carry more weight than a BBB rating.
The BBB? That's just a support group for people to vent about businesses they don't like. They don't have any actual power. Also, it seems like this has nothing to do with microsoft, and everything to do with lenovo using some proprietary hardware that linux doesn't yet support.
It seems like this has nothing to do with microsoft at all, and is just lenovo using proprietary hardware that linux doesn't yet have support for (i.e. the same thing that has been happening this whole time).
Supply and demand is about the closest thing to a natural law in the whole field of economics. If you don't believe in supply and demand, let me ask you this question:
Why doesn't uber just keep their prices perpetually high? What is the rationale for ever lowering prices? Aren't they a greedy corporation that would prefer to have the higher profits that come with selling products for higher prices?
So if supply and demand don't apply to pharmaceuticals, why did you think it was appropriate to use pharmaceuticals as an analogy for uber drivers (to which supply and demand are certainly applicable)?
Do you not know what supply and demand are?
The choice isn't between a $5 cure and a $100K cure. It's between a $100K cure or waiting until demand goes down.
If there were enough drivers on the road, the price would have been lower. The higher prices are to spur more drivers to get on the road. If you prevent uber from raising prices, all you are doing is disincentivizing drivers from working, and removing the option for customers to pay a high price for a ride.
If it's criminal to offer customers a higher price for a ride in a time of high demand, what is it when you remove their ability to get a ride at any price in a disaster?